this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Hello everybody,

What is the company and corporation that is the object of your hate? What did/do they do to get that spot for you?

Mine is Facebook/Meta for their egregious data collection policies, psychological manipulation of its users, and more recently, them not seeding content.

Thanks in advance for your time! Have a good one!

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[–] Majorllama 11 points 16 hours ago (10 children)

Microsoft.

And it's almost entirely because of excel.

We have a program that automatically outputs an excel document every month. I then have to go into this document and unfuck all the data that excel decided to turn into dates. There is no way to format the file before the program spits out the excel doc. There is now way to reverse the change and have it go back to the original data correctly.

I have spent countless hours on the phone with Microsoft support and digging around forums trying to make it stop breaking our data, but I have been told by multiple Microsoft support employees that it is impossible.

I did find out that there used to be a beta version of excel back in like 2017 where you could change a setting that forced your excel to leave all day alone until told to do something with it, but they never finished it and it was eventually removed as a setting.

WHY WOULD YOU TAKE AWAY THAT ABILITY MICROSOFT. WHY.

[–] moakley 3 points 7 hours ago (9 children)

There is definitely a way to automate that process. Even if you can't somehow sanitize the input before Excel reads it as dates, unfucking the data can definitely be reduced to a single button-push. I've based my entire career on my ability to do that.

[–] Majorllama 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I have had an untold number of coders and Microsoft experts look at this problem. There is nothing that can be done.

Program 1 cannot be changed as the job requires it and it will only automatically spit out into excel. Excel immediately breaks several numbers across the spreadsheet by turning them into dates. Nobody at Microsoft can get the sheets to revert back into the original data correctly. Nothing can be done to preemptively format excel not to fuck the dates.

[–] moakley 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

What do you mean "spit out"? Is it being put into a new open workbook, an existing open workbook, or is it being saved as a file?

And I don't mean to suggest I know better than the person actually dealing with the situation (I hate when people do that), but if you can do it manually, it can be automated.

[–] Majorllama 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The program generates a report for us once a month. It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use. When it generates the excel file it breaks a bunch of numbers that are used often and all throughout our data as excel thinks they are dates. When we try and reverse any of those numbers in all the many ways people have recommended the data never goes back all correctly. So I have to manually replace the data cell by cell afterwards.

We are unable to preemptively format any settings in excel to prevent this from happening.

There once was a beta version of excel that had the exact feature we need (excel leaves all data untouched unless told otherwise), but for some godforsaken reason Microsoft got rid of that setting.

[–] Nibodhika 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use.

This is probably a dumb question, and there's likely a very good reason why this can't be done, but can you not generate an Excel file from one of the other formats yourself? E.g. have the program output a CSV and write a python script that parses it into an excel file. That way you might have more control over the generated Excel and maybe be able to do it automatically.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

He can also use an alternative to excel like OpenOffice or libreoffice, I don't know why would they would use excel when it causes issues.

[–] Nibodhika 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Maybe the output to managers needs to be Excel for some reason, e.g. there's some processing afterwards with another closed tool.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 47 minutes ago

There is many formats that excel uses, the issue is probably with XLSX format, my guess the problem will be solved by either using a different software or changing the format to csv. If Microsoft doesn't want to bother solving the problem. It is very hard to pinpoint the exact problem without seeing the program, but I will never do something like this manually, I will probably make a script to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Must be the export into an Excel file that breaks it. By that point, an alternative reader won't help.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I think you mean export to xls, also each program will have a different way for exporting. It might be that the way excel does it breaks it.

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